But the place was beautifuclass="underline" beautiful the pure, hot, dazzling days of the tropical winter; beautiful the huge trees, wreathed with their snaky ropes of knotted liana, and tree-orchids flowering in a starry, unexpected fashion. Beautiful, in the bright glitter before midday, to see the people, the natives in their gay clothes, stringing along the white road, on their way to the village. Beautiful to look out at sunrise over the marsh, and see, far off, the line of begging priests, unearthly in yellow robes, pass ghostlily on the distant skyline. Anna was content as far as the country itself went. She liked the strange people and the strange land. But her life, her life among the English people, she abominated.
The country itself was full of glamour. Sometimes she went out very early when the sun had just risen. And then silently she would walk in the deep dust, already beginning to grow warm as the sun strengthened. She would feel the soft warmth of the deep, powdery dust under her feet, and it was like treading on a living flesh that warmed and upheld her. And she would walk on entranced, while the violet shadows crept under the tall trees, and the sides of the branches burned golden, and in the sky, so dazzlingly bright, the fiery body of the sun reared fiercely, against the dark blue space. The magnificence of it, she felt it in her heart, the grand, upward surge of the sun, ruthless, proud, like the triumphant progress of some savage god, barbaric, gorgeous. She felt the splendour in her blood, like wine.
But the terror, the sinister suggestion of the marsh was a menace to her. It pervaded everything. It was a kind of emblem of all her dismay, a symbol of her fear and loneliness. Standing on the wooden veranda, and watching Matthew walking away to his office, walking past the palm tree, over the open space, her heart would contract, she would almost cry out with the sense of her isolation. And Matthew was so inhuman, it was so impossible to speak to him, he gave her no support at all. He even increased her loneliness. Sometimes she felt she must die.
Sometimes she would watch the natives, the handsome brown people, men and women, laughing and singing and talking, as they went by. They looked so happy, with a strange, insouciant happiness that was fascinating to her, a happiness which belonged to some other world. She wanted to talk to them, to get the secret of their happiness. But it was not allowed. A white woman must not speak to a native except to give an order. She was surrounded by a rigid system of commands and prohibitions. So and so and so only must she do. The mysterious threat to British prestige hung like a scarlet danger flag in front of any diversion. And a profound, angry disgust took hold of Anna, a sort of contemptuous despair. She began to despair. There was no hope for her. She had brought her life to an end, she had cut herself off from life.
All that was left was the little feminine social world of the club. What a world for Anna’s habitation! She felt as though she were living in some restricted era of the Victorian past. Everything was cramped and stilted and uncomfortable, hedged in with iron laws of custom and precedent, a complex system of etiquette. And the whole system seemed to be directed against the exercise of personal freedom — particularly against the freedom of the women. Between the sexes lay a vast, unbridgeable abyss, there was no spot of common ground where a man might meet a woman frankly, as one human being meets another. The thoroughness of this sequestration astonished her.
At the club men and women did not mingle. There was the ladies’ room where occasionally a man would come and talk for a little while, a visitor from some higher sphere. And here the ladies sat. Into the men’s rooms they were forbidden to penetrate. And at parties, when they assembled at each other’s houses, the same division tended to arise. Sooner or later, as though obeying some natural law, the men would drift together at one end of the room, leaving the women abandoned at the other.
And then the attitude of the men to the women, and the women to the men — it was false, oh, unspeakably false, artificial to a degree. The men seemed to fall into one of two classes of behaviour. Either they ignored the women entirely, passing them over as though unaware of their existence, boorish to the point of downright rudeness; or they were assiduously gallant, flirtatious. Boorish or flirty, so the male population of Naunggyi appeared to Anna. Never for one moment did any man treat any woman as a rational human being. They seemed to regard the women either as nuisances to be ignored as completely as possible, or as childish, brainless creatures to be flattered and flirted with and forgotten as soon as anything more important turned up.
The women acquiesced. Most obligingly they fell in with this masculine scheme in which they had their place simply as a recreation ground, a form of light relief to the male world, the world of work and sport and important affairs. The women did not seem to question the godlike supremacy of their men. They even seemed honoured when these super-beings bestowed their ephemeral attentions. Their lives simply revolved round the men.
The life led by the women was a narrow voyaging between home and club. In the morning, early, before the sun was strong, they would walk a little to one another’s houses, accompanied by a servant of some sort. The incongruity of those stiff, opinionated female figures, their pale, faded faces and clothes, so inappropriate, in the great burning flood of sunlight! They were rather shrivelled, too, from the perpetual sunlight. Or else flabby and overblown.
Mrs. Barry who lived close by, would come under her green sunshade to visit Anna in the morning. And then, flopping down in one of the cane chairs, Mrs. Barry would talk to her. Anna smiled and tried to seem interested and polite. But what a conversation. It was not really conversation at all. Just a long, rambling flow of trivialities — children and servants and goats and the bad food at the bazaar. Anna was bored beyond words. And yet in her extreme loneliness she was almost glad of the noise, the mere noise of human speech was something to be thankful for.
Mrs. Barry was kind. They were all quite kind-hearted: except perhaps Mrs. Grove, the commissioner’s wife. Anna would have liked to get on with them, if she could. But she could not. For they all seemed so unapproachable, like a family of matronly dolls, impossible to get to know them. They were all so drearily set, so elderly; and, with it all, so unconvincing. Anna felt as if she were at a mother’s meeting when she sat with them at the club. And they looked at her with suspicion. They seemed to suspect her of evil intentions. They envied her youth and her freshness and her smart clothes and the way the men looked at her, sideways, with a secret expression. They could not forgive her these things. And she was cool and composed in her manner towards them, indifferent apparently, she did not treat them with the deference that was due from a young newcomer. So they began to dislike her. It seemed as if Anna, the stranger, had a certain fascination for them, but a perverse attraction, an attraction of instinctive dislike. They suspected her of looking down on them. When she used a longer word than usual, their backs went up, they privately accused her of being pretentious and conceited and affected. That most dismal of all hostilities, the touchy resentment of the ordinary person for an intellectual superior, had them in its grip. To Anna it sometimes seemed that she must die.
And the emptiness! The emptiness of the long hours of heat, when the world outside was a burning dazzle of brightness, and there was nothing to do but sit indoors and wait for sunset and the nightly expedition to the club. The other women kept themselves busy with their children and housekeeping and sewing, an apotheosis of domestic monotony. How was Anna to pass the time?